NVIDIA hiring eDRAM engineers - for Sony's PSP2? (and PS4?)

A quick look at NVIDIA's website will reveal that they are currently looking for eDRAM engineers. It's worth noting that they have never shipped any such design, and it seems extremely unlikely to us that anyone in the industry is planning to use eDRAM on products aimed at the PC market. As such, this could be a further confirmation that NVIDIA has the contract for Sony's PSP2 handheld.

Indeed, the original PSP has plenty of eDRAM (2MB for the GPU alone), and the PS2 GPU has its fair share of it too. These chips are manufactured in Sony's own fabs, which thus seem rather well tuned for it. It has already looked extremely likely for a while that NVIDIA would get the contract, as past financial conference calls have had Jen-Hsun Huang say that he believes the original PSP's graphics chip will be the last one developped in-house for any console or CE device. That wouldn't theorically exclude AMD from the contract though, of course - and while it's likely it has been decided by now who won the contract, it's also impossible to be sure.

Still, this eDRAM job offer is a further confirmation of NVIDIA's likely contract with Sony on this project, which you would expect to see shipping around 2009, given the traditional industry cycles. Assuming a royalty-based model, likely per-unit revenue would be between 3 and 5 dollars, in addition to one-time payments. That's not a lot of money for either NVIDIA or AMD nowadays, but it remains financially appealing because of the 100% margins associated with the deal.

The X Box 360 is'nt anything new with its ''new graphics card'' thats all it is. Its not next generation. On the otherhand, MS did not make Nvidia. PS3 and PS4 will be taking over for many, MANT years!

The X Box 360 is'nt anything new with its ''new graphics card'' thats all it is. Its not next generation. On the otherhand, MS did not make Nvidia. PS3 and PS4 will be taking over for many, MANT years!

If nVidia can turn out a powerful gpu within the confines of a handheld game system. I don't believe they have faced that constraint before. In things like cell phones or other multi-function devices, the graphics don't have to be powerful because they are only part time game machines, but a handheld is different. If it is PSP2, then the graphics have to surpass the original PSP which lies somewhere between a N64 and a PS2. It is going to be hard to improve on that given space limitations and the fact that it can't be allowed to get too hot or draw so much power that it reduces battery life.

ATI isn't the huge innovator that some people make them out to be; ED-RAM was already utilized heavily in Sony and Toshiba's PS2 and PSP hardware designs. The ED-RAM is a great standalone feature of the Xenos GPU, however it's limited by its very small size. Building only 10MB of ED-RAM when 720p frames are 14MB and 1080p frames are 32MB was just a bad idea all around. The point is to free up system bandwidth, not clog it by chopping up frames and sending them all over the place for post-processing and tiling.

Though it's not required, having such a design in conjunction with the XDR architecture and Flex I/O connection would be great. And the split memory architecture would only help. Hopefully nVidia learns from ATI/Microsoft's mistake and makes it 35~40MB instead of the paltry 10MB seen in the 360.

nVidia already signed a development contract back in February 2006 with Sony, though no one knows what for. Could be a Cell-based PSP2, the next Playstation, or both. --------------------------

Unified Pipelines are still unproven, which is why nVidia didn't use them with the RSX. Actually, it's a good thing that they stuck with dedicated pipelines because they were having trouble with unified pipelines in earlier projects, and thus trashed the idea for RSX.

No one can say how powerful/weak the Xenos GPU ALUs are, even in direct comparison with traditional dedicated pipelines. RSX has 32 pipelines, and Xenos has 48 ALUs. But ALUs are NOT pipelines, and vice versa. ALUs can switch between pixel and vertex functions, but there's no public information on what the performance cost of such functionality is. What we do know is that ATI saw a drawback, and thus made the Xenos better at handling pixels than vertices. They figured that pixels were more important than polygons, and in the closed environment of the 360 they would be able to see problems/mistakes and rectify those for future Unified Architecture GPUs.

ohh, is this why most PS3 games are running 30fps and 720P instead of 60fps and 1080P? Is this why 3rd party developers find it easier to develop for the 360? Is this why COD3 on the 360 runs better and looks better? ohh I got ya, ATI's XBox 360 video card sucks, and it was a complete disaster. And if the PS3 have not be able to out-perform the 360, explain how that hell did that happen? How come lost planet runs so smooth a 60fps and 1080P? Notice how I am giving you living proof of what the 360 video card can do while you are talking of your @$$ with theories that you obviously have no proof of. ohh yeah... right.. developers will learn how do do better in the future. while I admire your devotion to the PS brand, that's an expeculation and not a fact; which means $h!t in the real world.

Do you ever shut up. I love reading news on the 360 and the PS3 cos i personnaly love both consoles. They are both great. I cant say i own a PS3, but im lucky enough to be in quite a "rich" (if ya like) area of Britain, and i have two mates of mine living down ma road with an imported PS3, and its a great console. But you go and ruin all this news by posting the same sh*t over and over again that you've copied and pastedfrom Wikipedia or some place like that. Constant

The ps3 does not have a unified pipeline solution, yet the GeForce 8800 graphic card does, the ps3 does not have eDram, but you can bet the ps4 will. Also "DJ" anybody can and will tell you the traditional graphic cards, like the ps3, only perform at 50%-60% of it's actual specs.

Frequently I see the fact that the 360 uses a unified shader arch and the PS3 does not, posted here in these forums. Would someone be so kind as to explain why a unified arch provides a performance advantage over a non unified arch?

Traditional graphic cards, like the ps3, only performs at 50%-60% of it's actual specs, because vertex shaders and pixel shaders operate on different pipelines, thus causing the traditional graphic cards, like the ps3, to actually stall, so that vertex shaders and pixel shaders can perform their task on separate pipelines. Then the traditional graphic cards, like the ps3, displays the image onscreen. This stalling causes the traditional graphic cards, like the ps3, to operate at 50%-60% of it's actual specs.

Note that the ps3's rsx(graphic card) does not handle the vertex shaders for the ps3, instead that job is giving to the ps3's cell processor, but that still does not matter because the same "concept" still applies.

Now on the other hand the Xbox 360's Unified Shader Architect allows the Xbox 360's graphic card to operate at 100% because vertex and pixel shaders are done on any and all pipelines, allowing the Xbox 360's graphic card to produce vertex and pixel shaders and displaying them instantly.

Here is a way better explanation of why a unified architect is the way to go, and why even nividia has develop their Geforce 8800 graphic card to operate with a unified architect, thus leaving the ps3 behind.

We already know that the Xenos is more efficient than RSX, but ATI also stated in interviews that the RSX is actually more powerful. And in the closed environment of the PS3, there's actually no telling how efficient the RSX is going to perform when coupled with such a powerful CPU feeding it information.

The old views of 50~60% efficiency were based on PC architecture where the connection bandwidth between CPU and GPU were only 1/17th the connection bandwidth between Cell and RSX. ----------------------------- ---------------

nVidia was already experimenting with Unified Shaders years ago, but held back the project due to performance issues. It looks like they nixed that problem with their new 8800 series. Even though Unified Shaders can switch between tasks, there's a delay time between that switch. I think that was the issue.

can be done on the PS3, and any game on the PS3 can be done on the 360. The coding will be different, even very different from consule to consule, but neither system is superior in any one point to where it can play a game that another cant. So fanboys stop whining. The only usefullness to all this tech and spec talk is that it'll eventually lead to the next generation of consules (PS4 and 720) because those will play games that this generation cant.

The only thing that might come into play is the more space Blu Ray has over DVD, but that itself isn't a hardware issue. That's a format issue. I think Blu Ray does have an advantage because of the more space so developers can put more content into games. Still, I don't think there is a game out for the PS3 that couldn't also fit onto a DVD, but with games like MGS4 coming out, we'll just have to see. Look at the launch titles for the 360, then look at GoW. Big improvement right? It'll be interesting to see where PS3 games have progressed to in the same time frame.